The saga surrounding the Washington Post is just one of the latest signs of what is—and isn’t—happening to the news industry.

Take the Post’s self-serious Super Bowl ad, touting its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto. It was recently revealed that the ad was only run, after a crash production process of around a week, in the wake of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to nix a seven-figure ad for his Blue Horizon space company—a decision that emanated from his mistress’s work on the spot.

The ad was impressively representative of the strange mix of arrogance and insecurity whipping through the media space. Within the industry its message—and even its existence—was met approvingly as confirmation both that journalism needs a better sales pitch and that journalism is today’s indispensable bulwark of truth and justice.

The harsh truth laid bare by this odd double sensibility is that people today know well that, if anything, it’s not darkness damaging democracy but the deluge—the endless blizzard of facts the media mixes in with trivia, hype, spin, opinion, trolling, quizzes, and takes.

Ignorance is still generally accepted as bad in the abstract. But in lived experience, people prefer the shelter of ignorance to the punishing consequences of knowing—and saying—too much. People know for a fact that the worst kind of fake news is the phony presentation of the news industry as indispensable to their personal worth and flourishing.

It’s not that people are rejecting newspapers or television channels or news apps. It’s just that they know they’re being hectors to consume, care about, and “engage with” huge amounts of information that actually doesn’t do anything helpful for them.

Local news and regional news are growing in importance; a daily shot of national news remains valuable; the ability to instantly know if something seriously good or bad has happened retains a powerful appeal. Beyond that, however, it’s not clear right now what the bear market for big media really looks like—or where bottom might be.

The second big Washington Post story of the month tells that tale. Everyone seemingly took a minute or two to process Bezos’s disclosure that the parent company of the National Enquirer tried to blackmail him with compromising and intimate pics somehow obtained from Bezos’s phone. As the icing on the news cake, it appears possible that the Enquirer was able to obtain them through a foreign government.

What’s the real news? The salacious portion? The fact that it’s Bezos? The possibility of foreign involvement? The meta-story about the implosion of traditional tabloid journalism? Or perhaps the irony of Bezos’s hired personal investigator doing more to bare the truth than most media outlets could manage—or even care to try?

All of the above? None of the above? Is there a consensus or general answer to these questions? Regardless, what does any of this potential news actually deliver for people? What will that role played by that information cause people to actually do? And how much does it matter than the economic value of this news event was zero in money spent to learn it—and perhaps less than zero in the time spent blathering away about it?

These questions lack clear answers. And because they are playing out against the backdrop of the increasing automation of news, real and fake, they are likely, even if merely implicit in the minds of many, to give Americans even greater pause in pursuing their ambivalent relationship with big media.

News readers will know that companies like Bloomberg already rely on bots to churn out massive amounts of content that human reporters can’t or won’t do—for the money. Opinion readers will know that, already, human beings slinging takes are conforming more and more to the most readily identifiable and quickly distributable scripts. Both news and opinion are increasingly taking algorithmic form.

And at the same time that audiences appear to reward that kind of media behavior, media institutions themselves are slashing human jobs—and insisting ever more feverishly that our way of life is over if real journalism departs the cultural scene.

These extraordinarily mixed and likely incompatible messages strongly suggest that an even more powerful influence than audiences or money is being exerted on big media. That influence is technological. Media is flailing right now because it, and we, are in the midst of a sea change in our mental and social environment, one brought on by the inexorable power and sweep of digital tech.

Digital crafts an environment much different from the ones crafted by the printing press and television, even though television still holds a powerful grip over much of our headspace.

In the print and television sea, life and communication was all about people’s imaginations and interpretations—just like Thomas Hobbes feared after the Gutenberg Bible made it possible for any literate person to “engage with” its divine “content.” In the digital sea rushing in to expel the old, by contrast, biography and identity rule our shared and personal headspace.

The rush of attention around Bezos plainly indicates this change. So, even more, does the way big media’s pitch to the public about its great importance is falling flat. Digital pressure is diminishing the cultural cachet of elites expert in telling us what to imagine by constantly broadcasting their interpretations of new information. The identity crisis of those elites is the true big story about media today—even though so few of them dare report it.

James Poulos is a Southern California News Group columnist and editorial writer